How to move vApp between clusters

Caution: I’ve only tried this in a lab environment, be careful with production environments.

Although you can clone a vApp, the problem is…this will cost you a lot of time. A quicker way is to first move the vCops virtual machines out of the vApp and move them to the target cluster, then clone the vApp and add the virtual machines to the vApp again. So:

1. Shutdown the vApp.

2. Move (cold migrate) the virtual machines from one cluster to the other. If the storage is shared between the clusters, this process will not cost a lot of time.

3. Clone the vApp to the other cluster.

4. Add the virtual machines to the vApp.

5. Remove the original vApp

6. Rename the copied vApp if required.

7. Boot the vApp…done!

That’s all!

Update: you should reconfigure the startup order for the moved vApp. Although it’s not too complicated, you might want to write the startup order down before migrating.